Questions, Comments, Concerns: Week 3

Looking at the big picture, we were lucky to make it as far as the third week of the season before some huge scoring drama took over the headlines. That said, I don’t think we imagined it would be quite such a big drama. We’ll get into it. Impressively, that did not constitute all of the things that I wondered, pondered and worried about this week, though I’ll admit that it was probably a majority.

Question: How will Arkansas continue to match up against nationals-caliber teams?

Week 3 was, obviously, phenomenal for the Razorbacks. A program record on the road is always a huge deal, and even more so when it comes alongside a tie with a respected conference rival. (There’s been chatter about whether it should have been a tie. Personally I’m fine with it—the silly scores existed, but were pretty tit-for-tat throughout. Rachel Rybicki’s generous beam score, for example, was immediately balanced by Leah Smith’s floor.)

Arkansas’ schedule, often one of the toughest in the nation, won’t give the Razorbacks many easy wins. On the other hand, it does give them lots of opportunities for more signature results. After a very winnable home meet this week versus Auburn, Arkansas hits the road against LSU and Florida and then will see Alabama again at a quad meet in Texas. Is this week’s 197.525 just the beginning, or is it close to the Razorbacks’ peak? Will they be able to hold their nerve against top teams that have struggled with inconsistency lately? The next few weeks will tell us a lot about Arkansas’ ability to be a real contender this year.

Bonus Questions:

Is everyone just sick, or…? The beginning of this season has been marked by a large variety of random one-off unexplained absences. This week, people like Jillian Procasky, Syd Morris, Sage Thompson and Gabby Gladieux were sorely missed. It’s been a bad winter for viral illnesses in much of the world. Is that the story here?

Who wants to be Big Ten Freshman of the Week? All three weeks so far, the Big Ten has selected as its Freshman of the Week an athlete who only did one event. Courtney McCann scoring a 9.975 in her debut routine is honestly fair play, but the other two single scores were a 9.825 and a 9.875. That is usually not a recipe for a Power 5 weekly award, but there’s honestly not a lot on offer. When is this class going to start doing more events more often? (Shout out to Maryland’s Natalie Martin, who is the great exception to this pattern and hasn’t gotten an award for it yet.)

Comment: Lily Smith is… the future?

It’s an understatement to say that Georgia has needed something to believe in this year. This era. The entire last decade. There have been a lot of great, exciting, memorable Georgia gymnasts, but there hasn’t been someone who really looked like the road out of… everything the entire last decade has been. There have been recruits who looked like they might be that, but none who have gotten as far 

Getting the team’s first freshman 10.000 since 2001 is really remarkable, considering the amount of genuine excellence at Georgia and also the amount of scoring nonsense that has taken place in the interim. But there’s an X-factor to Smith too even beyond the immaculate form and effortless landings. You watch her and want to believe.

I don’t want to make any projections about future accomplishments or team rankings or anything like that. Georgia giveth and Georgia taketh away. But she’s something very special.

Bonus Comments:

Mara Titarsolej fixed herself in exactly the way we all knew she would. I don’t have a great explanation for why the Dutchwoman’s gorgeous Bhardwaj has always held her scores down. I wish it didn’t. But it didn’t work at LIU and it didn’t work at Missouri either, and giving it two tries before downgrading to the routine that works and has always worked was very reasonable. It was great to see her immediately rewarded.

I want to point out Arizona as a team that’s quietly killing it right now. With such a solid core of returning routines and a great freshman class, the potential was always there for the Wildcats to have a great season, but what I’m seeing is a new level of consistency and steadiness. I don’t know what their ceiling is or what their goals are as a team, but so far, I’m just really enjoying them.

Concern: Okay, I guess we have to talk about Tennessee.

There’s a lot that went wrong here. First of all, this meet has always been like this, and it’s never been streamed. It doesn’t take a great deal of cynicism to suspect that there was, if not an overt arrangement, at least some kind of understanding and symbiosis between the meet organizers and teams. Everyone wins, right? I mean, no.

Whatever happened here exists in the context of escalating scoring issues across the country but is also a completely different thing. There’s a lot of complexity in this. There are radical overscoring believers out there who genuinely believe that if you put Ball State in Oklahoma leotards in the LNC tomorrow, they would score exactly the same and that there’s no actual difference in caliber of gymnastics. I pretty strongly object to that idea. Your average LSU home meet will definitely have a couple of routines that are 0.2 above where they ought to be because a mistake is just ignored, but that’s very different from that level of error being made on virtually every routine that we’ve seen. (Watch for our resident judge Rhiannon’s take on judging at this meet, too.)

I’m not going to write a manifesto about what this means for the sport. People smarter than me have already done that, and frankly I don’t know what the big picture aftermath of a meet like this will be. It’s just really perplexing that there’s no accountability after something like this happens. There are perfect 10s that we will only ever see in Instagram story or in horizontal video that doesn’t show handstands or landings. At least when someone at the World Championships makes a mistake to the tune of half a point in the middle of a close final, there’s some kind of review process and mea culpa, even if it’s probably poor consolation. The fact is that probably there probably won’t be any aftermath at all. Nobody’s going to revisit this and there won’t be any changes. Fun, right?

Also, I can’t make a joke that’s funnier than the raw fact that Ball State immediately turned off replies to all of its tweets about the entire meet. Way to stick to your guns, guys. Very brave.

(Note: My intention was to to name-drop top teams in an equitable way here, since they’re pretty much all accused of being overscored from time to time. You can mentally replace Oklahoma and LSU with Florida and UCLA if it makes you happier. That choice was random and has nothing to do with my own beliefs on who is the most overscored.)

Bonus Concern:

Is UCLA going to put it together? I think it’s too soon to fully raise the alarm on a team with so many gymnasts who are capable of taking it up a notch. The Bruins also haven’t been home yet this season, and returning to Pauley this weekend could easily change the game. But it’s worth remembering that this is a slightly undermanned (underwomanned?) roster compared to the average Bruin squad and that it’s possible the ceiling is just lower for that reason. In particular, I’m not loving where bars is right now. I’m genuinely not sure if there are six legitimate postseason-able bars routines available.

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Article by Rebecca Scally